Constellation

It’s tempting to simply dismiss Constellation as a TV movie-quality feature, but such a description nonetheless probably sells TV movies short. Charting the reunion of the Boxer family at the funeral for their matriarch Carmel, the film is a one-way trip to Schmaltzville, which would be okay if the journey itself weren’t so intolerably bumpy and the destination didn’t prove so completely lousy. Via superfluous camera movements and swelling sad songs, Jordan Walker-Pearlman details the plight of Carmel’s brother Helms (Billy Dee Williams), who, after being tricked into attending his sister’s service, is forced to deal with his ex-wife (Lesley Ann Warren), ex-lover (Rae Dawn Chong), two daughters (Melissa De Sousa and Zoe Saldana), as well as a white man named Bear (David Clennon) who deserted Carmel during the miscegenation-disapproving ‘50s—leading to Carmel being violently raped—but maintained a loving letter correspondence with her until her death. Troubled interracial relationships are littered throughout Constellation, yet black-white tensions are secondary to the director’s overriding and incessantly articulated theme about seizing (rather than fleeing) opportunities for love. Even so, repetitive preachiness is a minor problem compared to the film’s unnatural conversational rhythms, ineptly overlapped dialogue (like low-rent Robert Altman), protracted shots of characters staring off into the distance (cue awkwardly shoehorned-in memories!), horrid ADR work, and plenty of visual incongruities involving Carmel, who was relatively old when she died but is played in flashbacks by 34-year-old Gabrielle Union—a decision that leads to clumsy scenes such as Union pretending to be Saldana’s adult aunt despite their meager six-year age difference. This rampant carelessness peaks with a round-robin climax of reconciliations that’s painfully unearned, since Walker-Pearlman skips dramatizing the reasons his husbands, wives, fathers, daughters, and lovers might forgive each other. Although, as he confirms with a married couple’s ludicrous make-out session in a car while the woman’s mother sits in the backseat, Walker-Pearlman’s sloppiness is, at least in part, an outgrowth of his general unfamiliarity with plausible human behavior.

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